Spectacu.la, a WordPress theme club, has just announced the release of their free threaded comments plugin for WordPress. Basically what this plugin does is replace your theme’s comments template with a new one, generated by the plugin.
In addition to that, you also get pagination and jQuery based roll up of subordinate comments. For those who remember the old Theme Lab which used Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin, it’s kind of like that, except neater.
The plugin should work on almost any theme, even if it normally doesn’t support threaded comments, provided it uses the comments_template() call.
Pictured above is the light and dark styles of the comments which are included in the plugin. Read on to check out my screencast which demonstrates these two styles on a really old theme that wasn’t originally designed to support threaded comments.
This can be useful to to theme developers who would rather make use of this comments template instead of designing their own, or at least use their own styles to sculpt the comments form to their liking with the built-in comment stylesheets disabled.
Let me know what you think of this plugin in the comments. Would you consider using this plugin on your sites? Here’s the link again.
Thanks for doing the screencast there – I’d totally forgotten to thank you on here – much appreciated!
Yes, the plugin should just add support to almost any theme, or in some cases improve the theme. The CSS is designed to be as tolerant as possible of current styles and will pick up what it can without issues cropping up. In essence, it’s built with our ‘just work’ philosophy in mind.
There are possible occasions when it may go wrong, but we’ve not found one yet.
PS. Do like your work – maybe we should talk sometime 😉
will be great for old themes.
btw, your new look is awesome.
Yep, for sure. There are some great old themes out there but unfortunately haven’t been updated in a while and don’t have threaded comments built-in, so this plugin will definitely come in handy for those.
And thanks for the kind words on the new design. 😀
Thats sick. Should come in handy.
Does it overwrite themes that “do” support it, with the styles that come with the plugin ? :O
Should overwrite any theme that uses
<?php comments_template(); ?>. There might be conflicting styles in the theme’s stylesheet which you would probably have to comment out or delete if the comments looked weird.